Case Study – NEDL (Northern Electric Distribution Ltd)
NEDL – part of Northern Electric , the UK subsidiary of
US utilities MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company (www.midamerican.com) –
operates and maintains the electricity distribution network which
delivers electricity to more than 1.4 million premises in the North
East of England and North Yorkshire. The network consists of more
than 31,000 substations, 17,000 km (10,600 miles) of overhead line
and 26,000 km (16,250 miles) of underground cable, covering an area
of more than 14,000 sq. km (5,500 sq. miles).
The IT unit for NEDL operates a number of large Hewlett-Packard,
IBM and Sun UNIX systems. These systems host the mission critical
applications and central to the processing of data in this heterogeneous
environment is OSM's COSbatch job scheduling system.
Dave Bunting, IT Production Manager of NEDL said "We run
hundreds of batch jobs per week with complex preconditions across
the network. Without a reliable job scheduler we would have to initiate
those jobs manually at significant cost." Dave went on to say,
"We are a seven day a week, 24 hour a day operation with critical
services running and are accountable to both OFGEM (the UK market
regulator) and our customers. We use COSbatch to help monitor
the status of the network and manage our routine billing and accounting
functions."
NEDL also use BMC Software's Patrol product for monitoring and
have integrated COSbatch into Patrol using OSM's COSbatch
Knowledge Module. To this they have added Proxima Technology's AlarmManage
module. Dave Bunting said "We've been able to cut out shift
working altogether by having any out-of-hours alarms generated from
COSbatch go through Patrol to AlarmManage. The appropriate
administration staff are now based at home and get context-sensitive
messages detailing the problem. This enabled me to make a cost saving
in our operations budget." The monitoring extends to the reporting
on failed jobs, a routine which is run every five minutes. OSM supplied
the Patrol and AlarmManage software as well as COSbatch and
the COSbatch KM.
NEDL also use one of the unique features of COSbatch –
the ability to use a character user interface on legacy "green
screen" technology. This cuts down network traffic and allows
NEDL employees to dial in over low speed modem lines to monitor
jobs online.
Dave finished by saying "Of particular note is OSM's support
operation. We hit a sporadic problem a while ago which could not
easily be diagnosed. OSM escalated the problem up to the highest
level and the Technical Director himself communicated with us on
a daily basis until the problem was identified and resolved. This
level of commitment makes all the difference when you are so dependent
on technology as in our industry."
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